Hey everyone, Daniel here from Next Level Life and today we’re going to be taking
a look at Subliminal | How your unconscious mind rules your behavior.
Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish behavior that is willful from behavior that
is habitual or automatic.
Especially when we, as humans, often tend to believe that consciously motivated behavior
is so powerful that we read consciousness into not only our own behaviors but those
of the animal kingdom as well.
It’s called anthropomorphizing and we often do it with our pets.
A common example of this would be when a dog barks at the mailman.
Is the dog just excited to see another person?
Or is there something in the dog’s biological constitution that makes them bark at strangers.
Maybe it's some sort of protective instinct that dogs have built up over thousands of
years.
This book summary is going to be a little bit different than my last one, because the
basic idea of this book can be summed up pretty quickly.
Basically the idea is that the dog’s actions are motivated by instincts as much as, if
not more so, than by conscious decision making.
And there are many ways that we, as humans, are subject to the same type of thing.
We want to believe that our decisions are grounded in logic and reason and that they
are all under our control, but in truth there are many things going on just beneath the
surface that we aren’t aware of and these things distort our view of reality.
That’s basically the idea in a nutshell.
So I’m instead going to focus on a few of the examples in the book that I found the
most interesting.
Let’s get started.
The first idea that I want to share with you is known as the visual dominance ratio.
In modern human society there are two kinds of dominance.
One is physical dominance and the other is social dominance.
Physical dominance aims to influence others through fear and aggression, but social dominance
is based on admiration.
And the visual dominance ratio is a neat little trick to quickly figure out who is “in charge”
so to speak, quickly.
Here’s how to find the ratio, take the percentage of time you spend looking into someone’s
eyes while you are speaking and divide it by the percentage of time you spend looking
into their eyes when you are listening.
So if you spend an equal amount of time looking into someone’s eyes when you’re talking
as you do when you’re listening, your ratio would be 1:1.
But if you looked into the person’s eyes more when you were speaking than when you
were listening your ratio would be greater than 1:1.
And generally those who have more social power, like most bosses for example, have a greater
than 1:1 ratio in this area.
The second idea that I want to talk about is how to use your voice in a way that will
make you sound more credible.
The pitch, timbre, volume, and cadence of your voice can all affect how convincing you
are as well as how people judge the state of your mind and your character.
So can the speed you speak at and how you modulate the pitch and volume of your voice.
In several studies where scientists scrambled the recordings of people in order to make
the meaning of what the person said impossible to understand they found a significant difference
in how people judged these so-called “content-free” recordings.
Even though each person who was recorded said exactly the same thing, since their audio
was unintelligible the way people received it couldn’t have had anything to do with
what was actually said, but would have something to do with how it was said.
It was found that those who spoke with higher pitched voices were judged to be less truthful,
empathic, and more nervous than those with lower voices.
They also found that people who talked slower were seen as less truthful and persuasive
and also more passive than those who talked faster.
Now fast-talking may be a cliched description of dozens of sleazy salesman the world over,
but chances are, a little speedup in your speech will help you sound smarter and more
convincing.
As long as you don’t go so fast that you start stumbling over your own words.
The third and final idea that I want to share with you is known as the “above-average
effect.”
There was once a survey done on nearly one million high school seniors.
One of the questions asked them to judge themselves on their own ability to get along with others.
Nearly 100% of them rated themselves as at least average in this category, about 60%
rated themselves in the top 10% and 25% thought that they were in the top 1% of all those
surveyed.
This is something that unconsciously affects just about every one of us from the executive
that got fired for allowing revenues to plummet, but still thinks that they deserve that $50
million exit package to overly optimistic stock pickers, and even to the 94% of college
professors that say they do above average work in a similar survey to the one I mentioned
a moment ago.
And ironically people tend to be able to see that this overconfidence can be a problem…
but only in others.
Yeah, we even overestimate our ability to resist overestimating our abilities.
So what’s going on?
How can a manager that is routinely missing their numbers simultaneously convince themselves
that they have the talent, but when a promotion goes to a coworker instead of them, also manage
to convince themselves that it’s only because the boss was somehow misguided?
I think that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said it best when he said that there are two
ways of getting at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.
Scientists gather evidence, look for patterns, form theories and then test them.
Lawyers begin with a conclusion that they want to convince others of and then look for
evidence that supports it while also attempting to discredit any evidence that doesn’t.
While on the surface gathering evidence and then forming a belief based on that evidence
seems to be the more rational choice in everyday life, taking the lawyer path often times will
make you more happy.
And the mind generally opts for the path that will make us feel more happy, even when it’s
not the most rational path.
As it turns out the brain is a decent scientist, but an absolutely outstanding lawyer!
So that’s subliminal and if I were to present a brief conclusion on the summary that I gave
at the start of the video I would say this: Evolution didn’t design our brains to understand
itself.
It was designed to help us survive.
We observe ourselves and our world and make just enough sense of everything to get along.
And some of us, including all of you that have watched this far into the video are interested
in understanding ourselves more deeply.
Maybe to make better life decisions, or just to have a richer life now, or maybe just out
of curiosity.
Whatever the reason is, we’re looking to get past our natural ideas of ourselves.
And we can.
We can use our conscious mind to cut through those cognitive illusions that distort our
reality and get to know ourselves better.
But as we do it’d be a good idea to maintain an appreciation of the fact that, if our mind’s
natural view of the world is a little skewed, it is skewed for a reason.
Thanks for watching and have a great day.